Here are some examples of monotone functions.

A cunning plan

There's a two-player game called 10 questions, in which player A begins the game by stating "I'm thinking of an X", where X can be replaced with any noun of player A's choosing.

Then player B asks player A a series of questions, which player A must answer with either truthfully with "yes" or "no". After asking 10 questions, player B is forced to guess what the object player A was thinking of. Player B wins if the guess is correct, and loses otherwise. Player B may guess before 10 turns have expired, in which case the guess counts as one of their questions.

Here is an example of a game of 10 questions:

A: I'm thinking of a food.

Question 1. B: Is it healthy? A: Yes.

Question 2. B: Is it crunchy? A: No.

Question 3. B: Must it be prepared before it is eaten? A: No.

Question 4. B: Is yellow? A: Yes.

Question 5. B: Is it a banana? A: Yes.

Player B wins

Now suppose that you are playing 10 questions as player B. Player A begins by stating "I'm thinking of a letter of the alphabet." You immediately think of a strategy that requires no more than 5 guesses: repeatedly ask "does it come after ?" where $⋆$ is near the middle of the contiguous sequence of letters that you have not yet eliminated. Initially the contiguous sequence of letters between A and Z have not been eliminated.

Question 1. You: Does it come after M? Player A: Yes.

At this point, the contiguous sequence of 13 letters that have not been eliminated is N-Z, inclusive.

Question 2. You: Does it come after S? Player A: No.

At this point, the contiguous sequence of 6 letters that have not been eliminated is N-S, inclusive.

Question 3. You: Does it come after P? Player A: Yes.

We've now narrowed it down to Q,R,and S.

Question 4. You: Does it come after R? Player A: No.

Question 5. You: Does it come after Q? Player A: No.

You: Is it Q? Player A: Yes.

You win

But what does this have to do with monotone functions? The letters of the alphabet form a poset $A l p h = ⟨ {A, . . ., Z}, \leq_{A l p h} ⟩$ (in fact, a totally ordered set) under the standard alphabetic order. Your strategy for playing 10 questions can be viewed as probing a monotone function from $A l p h$ to the 2-element poset 2 of a boolean values, where $f a l s e <_{2} t r u e$ . Specifically, the probed function $f : A l p h \to 2$ is defined such that $f (⋆) ≐ Q >_{A l p h} ⋆$

The monotonicity of $f$ is crucial to being able to eliminate possibilities at each step. If we probe $f$ at a letter $⋆_{1}$ and observe a false result, then any letter $⋆_{2}$ less than $⋆_{1}$ must map to false as well: $⋆_{2} \leq_{A l p h} ⋆_{1}$ implies $f (⋆_{2}) \leq_{2} f (⋆_{1})$ . Yes, we can demonstrate the aformentioned monotone function with a diagram, but since its size is unwieldy, it has been placed in the following hidden text block.

Show solution

Diagram of f

Deduction systems

Deduction_systems allow one to infer new judgments from a set of known judgments. They are often specified as a set of rules, in which each rule is represented as a horizontal bar with one or more premises appearing above the bar and a conclusion that can be deduced from those premises appearing below the bar.

A deduction system

The above rules form a fragment of propositional logic. $ϕ$ and $ψ$ are used to denote logical statements, called propositions. $\land$ and $\to$ are binary logical operators, each of which maps a pair of propositions to a single proposition. $\land$ is the and operator: if $ϕ$ and $ψ$ are logical statements, then $ϕ \land ψ$ is the simultaneous assertion of both $ϕ$ and $ψ$ . $\to$ is the implication operator: $ϕ \to ψ$ asserts that if we know $ϕ$ to be true, then we can conclude $ψ$ is true as well.

The leftmost rule has two premises $ϕ$ and $ψ$ , and concludes from these premises the proposition $ϕ \land ψ$ . Invoking a rule to deduce its conclusion from its premises is called applying the rule. A tree of rule applications is called a proof.

Deduction systems are often viewed as proof languages. However, it can also be fruitful to view a deduction system as a function which, given a set of input propositions, produces the set of all propositions that can be concluded from exactly one rule application, using the input propositions as premises. More concretely, letting $X$ be the set of propositions, the above set of deduction rules corresponds to the following function $F : P (X) \to P (X)$ .

$F (A) = {ϕ \land ψ ∣ ϕ \in A, ψ \in A} \cup {ϕ ∣ ϕ \land ψ \in A} \cup {ψ ∣ ϕ \land ψ \in A} \cup {ϕ ∣ ψ \in A, ψ \to ϕ \in A}$

$F$ is a montone function from the poset $⟨ P (X), \subseteq ⟩$ to itself. This is so beacause larger input sets give us more ways to apply the rules of our system, yielding larger output sets. A provable proposition is clearly an element of $A = ⋃_{n \geq 0} F^{n} (\emptyset)$ . We'd like to characterize $A$ as the least fixpoint of $F$ ; i.e., we'd like to prove that $F (A) = A$ and for all $B \subset X$ , $F (B) = B$ implies $A \subset B$ .

In addition to standard logical notions, deduction systems can be used to describe type systems, program logics, and operational semantics.

Additional material

If you still haven't had enough monotonicity, might I recommend trying some of the exercises?

Increasing functions

A monotone function between two totally ordered sets is called increasing. For example, the graph of a monotone function from the poset $⟨ R, \leq ⟩$ to itself has an upward slope. Such functions can be searched efficiently using the binary search algorithm.

Monotone function